He liked to draw, and sought out places he could learn more about art. In his youth, Kirby desired to escape his neighborhood. Among his close friends was Leon Klinghoffer, who grew up in the same neighborhood, and who was shot, killed and thrown overboard from the cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian Liberation Front hijackers. Kirby grew up in the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City. His parents, Rose (Bernstein) and Benjamin Kurtzberg, were Austrian-Jewish immigrants, and his father earned a living as a garment factory worker. Jack Kirby was born Jacob Kurtzberg on August 28, 1917, at 147 Essex Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City, where he was raised. The Jack Kirby Awards and Jack Kirby Hall of Fame were named in his honor, and he is known as " The King" among comics fans for his many influential contributions to the medium. They had four children and remained married until his death from heart failure in 1994, at the age of 76. Kirby was married to Rosalind Goldstein in 1942. In 2017, Kirby was posthumously named a Disney Legend for his creations not only in the field of publishing, but also because those creations formed the basis for The Walt Disney Company's financially and critically successful media franchise, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In his later years, Kirby, who has been called "the William Blake of comics", began receiving great recognition in the mainstream press for his career accomplishments, and in 1987 he was one of the three inaugural inductees of the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame. Kirby returned to Marvel briefly in the mid-to-late 1970s, then ventured into television animation and independent comics. While these series proved commercially unsuccessful and were canceled, the Fourth World's New Gods have continued as a significant part of the DC Universe. Kirby's titles garnered high sales and critical acclaim, but in 1970, feeling he had been treated unfairly, largely in the realm of authorship credit and creators' rights, Kirby left the company for rival DC.Īt DC, Kirby created his Fourth World saga which spanned several comics titles. There, in the 1960s, Kirby co-created many of the company's major characters, including the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Ant-Man, Thor, Iron Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, the Silver Surfer, and the Black Panther, among numerous others. Kirby was involved in Timely's 1950s iteration, Atlas Comics, which in the next decade became Marvel. At Crestwood Publications, he and Simon created the genre of romance comics and later founded their own short-lived comic company, Mainline Publications. During the 1940s, Kirby regularly teamed with Simon, creating numerous characters for that company and for National Comics Publications, later to become DC Comics.Īfter serving in the European Theater in World War II, Kirby produced work for DC Comics, Harvey Comics, Hillman Periodicals and other publishers. In 1940, he and writer-editor Joe Simon created the highly successful superhero character Captain America for Timely Comics, predecessor of Marvel Comics. He entered the nascent comics industry in the 1930s, drawing various comics features under different pen names, including Jack Curtiss, before ultimately settling on Jack Kirby. He grew up in New York City and learned to draw cartoon figures by tracing characters from comic strips and editorial cartoons. The scene setting so brilliantly and beautifully detailed that a picture was drawn in my mind as I listened! The plot, beautifully complex giving all the information, past and present, necessary to throughly understand the story! I’m giving no plot details so as not to spoil the many twists, turn and surprises for future listeners, but know they were plentiful and eye opening! The narration was very special on this one.Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg Aug– February 6, 1994) was an American comic book artist, writer and editor, widely regarded as one of the medium's major innovators and one of its most prolific and influential creators. Duncan and Carl, two friends who inadvertently run afoul of one of them, a father looking for his missing son, and a mysterious woman from the past weaving a thread of intrigue through this dark, riveting tale! A tale that kept me on the edge of my seat, oftentimes cringing in horror, yet completely enthralled, breathlessly thirsting for the next detail, the next betrayal, the next answer! I was so hooked! I could not stop listening! The characters, some quirky, some sympathetic, some outright deranged, others throughly deplorable, all so well defined and developed if you closed your eyes you could SEE them. The Chillcott’s and the Bartell’s, two crime families, once allies, now not so much.
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